Chapter Fourteen
Morag Caindach knew the men she was killing.
Not by name, most of them. But she knew the way they were made.
She knew the brown and dark green they wore under the mail.
She knew the way a Caindach fighter drops his left shoulder before he comes forward, because she had grown up watching them do it in her father’s yard and had been beaten for saying so out loud.
These were her father’s men. Ian Campbell was not on this field at all, and the shame of that sat in her while she worked, because it was her name on every one of them.
She had understood that inside the first minutes.
There were no Campbell captains anywhere in the press, and no one was giving orders in that flat courteous voice she had heard once in a hall and would know again in her sleep.
Ian had sent the Caindachs to break McKenzie Keep and had stayed away from it himself.
Every one of these men had come here believing he was somewhere behind them.
The line broke apart in front of the gate and the whole battle came to pieces with it.
That was where she lost Christopher.
One moment his shoulder was against hers and he was saying something she did not catch. The next there was a horse between them, then a wall of men, then nothing but backs and mail and noise.
Morag stopped where she was and turned all the way around, and the terror got hold of her by the throat.
The fear came up through her so fast that her hands went cold on the grip.
She had spent her whole life being the calm one in a room full of shouting.
It did nothing for her at all now. She could not see him.
She could not see him anywhere. Men were going down all around her, and any one of them could have been him.
Then the smoke went sideways. She found him, and her heart came back into her chest so hard it hurt.
He was against the outer wall of the keep with the stone at his back, and there were three of them in front of him.
He was doing what Christopher always did, which was to make himself very hard to finish and very boring to fight.
He had his back covered and his blade low.
He gave ground half a step at a time. He took none of the openings they offered him, because every one of them was a trap and he had seen it.
He would last a long time like that. He would not last forever, though, and watching him do it was the worst thing she had ever had to stand still for.
And standing behind those three, on the rise by the burnt cart, was her father.
Robert Caindach had not put himself anywhere near the fighting. He was where he always was, on the high ground with his sword still clean, bellowing at his men and pointing.
He was pointing at Christopher.
Morag loved two people in this world. One of them was against that wall with three men in front of him, and the other one was on the rise offering coin for his head.
“There! That one! I want that one’s head off, do ye hear me? A hundred merks tae the man that brings me Alistair Campbell’s son!”
Something happened in Morag then that she had no name for. The fear went out of her all at once, the way water goes out of a tipped bowl. What came in behind it was so much worse for the man on that rise that she was almost sorry for him.
Then she ran.
There was a Caindach in her way with his back to her.
She did not give him the courtesy of a warning, because there was no time in the world for it.
She took him behind the knee, put him down, and went over him while he was still falling.
The second one saw her coming and turned to meet her.
He was quick. He got his blade up in time.
He did not get his feet right, however. So she let him swing.
She took it high on her own sword and stepped inside where he could not use the length of it, and put her knife up under his ribs with her left hand.
Christopher had taught her that stroke, on a wet morning in the yard at Murray Keep, when she could not yet hold a sword up for the length of a bout. She thought about that while she was doing it, and it steadied her.
The third man had his sword above his head and was bringing it down on Christopher’s shoulder when she reached them.
The Caindach mail was good across the chest and poor at the armhole. Every one of them knew it. Her father had refused for years to pay for the better pattern, because he had never once stood in the front rank himself and did not believe the difference was worth the coin.
Morag put her blade through the gap at his arm. The man came apart in the middle of the stroke and went down.
Christopher came off the wall with his chest heaving and his face grey. The sight of him alive went through her like a hot drink.
“Ye’re hurt,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“Yer arm—”
“It’s nae mine.” She turned around. “Christopher. Look.”
He looked.
She watched her husband see Robert Caindach on the rise.
She watched him work out, exactly as fast as she had, that the man had been standing there the whole time.
That he had watched three of his own men go at his daughter’s husband, and had not once looked to see where his daughter was.
That last part sat in her chest like a stone and would be there, she suspected, for years.
“Together,” Christopher said.
“Aye.”
They went at him together and they went the short way.
It was not far and it took a long time. Her father saw them coming when they were halfway up it, and he did not put himself in front of a single man of his own. He shouted.
“Stop them! Are ye deaf, the lot of ye? Get down there and put them in the ground!”
Two of his household came off the rise. Christopher took the first. She took the second.
“The rest of ye! Tae me! Tae me, ye useless—”
The rest did not come down, however loudly he called them, because Caindach men had never in their lives been paid enough to die for Robert Caindach.
Her father drew his sword when she was still short of the rise.
“Morag,” he said. “So it’s true, then.”
She did not answer him. She had nothing to say that he had not already decided the meaning of.
He came at her hard and straight and expecting it to be enough. He was a big man and he was strong. The first stroke went down her arm and into her shoulder and nearly took the sword out of her hand.
The second one she turned.
The third one she was ready for, because it was the same as the first. It had always been the same as the first. Her father had learnt to fight from men who were frightened of him and had never once had to change anything.
Morag had been married to a man who fought like a locked door. She had made him teach her. She had practised in a yard at Murray Keep every morning, while her father assumed she was doing whatever it was he imagined women did.
She let his weight come forward. She caught his blade high and rolled her wrists. Robert Caindach’s sword went out of his hand and rang away across the stones.
He stared at it.
She put her boot into the inside of his knee, hard, and the leg went out from under him. He came down onto both knees in the mud in front of her, and she had the point of her sword under his chin before he had finished falling.
The noise of the battle went on somewhere behind her.
She was not aware of very much of it. Her ears were roaring.
Her whole arm ached from the shoulder down where he had hit her.
Her father knelt in front of her with his mouth working.
She looked down at him and found, to her own surprise, that her hands were perfectly steady at last.
“Ye traitor,” he said. “Ye filth. Ye ungrateful, faithless—”
“Aye.”
“I fed ye. I housed ye. I put a name on ye that was worth somethin’ in this country and ye gave it tae a lowly bastard, ye gave it tae the son of the man that—”
She had waited her whole childhood for one warm word from this man. Somewhere under all of it she was waiting still. That was the part she was most ashamed of.
“Where is Ian?”
Robert Caindach laughed at her.
Christopher came around on his other side and put the point of his own sword under the man’s jaw. He did it gently, which was somehow far worse than if he had been rough.
“She asked ye a question,” Christopher said.
“Ye’ll get nothin’ from me.”
“Where is he? He isnae here. He’s had yer men come at a keep full of old men and boys while he sat somewhere warm, and ye let him.
” Christopher’s voice did not rise at all.
“Ye’ve spent yer whole house on his war, Caindach.
Every one of these lads on this ground is yers, and nae one of them is his. Do ye ken what that makes ye?”
Something moved in her father’s face.
Morag saw it. She had spent her childhood learning that face the way other children learn their letters, because in her father’s house you knew what was coming by watching him, or you did not know until it arrived.
She could read the tells on him from across a hall.
She had never once been wrong about him.
And what went over him now was not fear, and it was not shame.
It was satisfaction.
“Kill me, then,” Robert Caindach said. “Go on, lass. Ye’ve the blade at me neck. Ye’ll be doin’ it for nothin’, mind.”
“Say what ye mean.”
“I mean it doesnae matter.” He smiled up at her.
His teeth were red. He was enjoying himself.
“Ye can have this field. Ye can have every man I brought and welcome tae them. Ye’ll go home tonight and ye’ll tell each other ye’ve won, and ye’ll sit down at yer table and ye’ll be pleased with yerselves, and it’ll all be for nothin’, because he’s already taken the thing that matters and ye dinnae even ken what it is. ”
“What has he taken?”
“Ask me again in a week…”
“Father—”
“Ye’ll lose,” he said. “Ye’ll lose again, and soon, and ye’ll never see it comin’ when it comes. Ye never do.”
Morag stood very still. Her eyes had filled and she was furious about it. She did not wipe them, because it would have meant taking a hand off the sword.
She could hear her own blood. She could feel exactly how easy it would be, and how much she wanted to.
She was honest enough with herself even then to know that it was not justice she wanted.
It was quiet. She wanted him to stop talking.
There was one certain way to make that happen and it was under her hand.
God help her, she was glad it was there.
She took the blade off his throat.
“Morag,” Christopher said.
“He’s the only man on this field who kens where Ian Campbell is.
” She stepped back. She didn’t look away from her father’s face, because she wanted him to see her decide it.
“A dead man tells ye nothin’. And he’s spent his whole life wantin’ me tae be like him, so I’ll disappoint him one last time. ”
Her father’s smile went off him then. That was the only thing she had done all day that reached him. She was ashamed of how much comfort she took from it.
“Bind his hands,” she said, and her voice came out steady, and she was glad of that at least.
It was ending all around them by that time.
The Murray riders had come across the whole width of that ground while she was on the rise.
The Caindach line had folded from the outside in.
There was nowhere left for any of them to run, because Christopher had shut the eastern side against the burn hours before.
Rolland Murray was in the middle of it on that mad stallion of his with his voice going out over everything.
Elsie’s archers were up on the higher ground on the left.
They had stopped shooting, because there was nothing left in front of them worth an arrow.
Caindach men were putting their swords on the ground all over that field. They were surrendering, in twos and threes and then in whole knots at a time, and no one had given them the order to do it.
And then, behind them, the great doors of McKenzie Keep began to open.
They came outward, slowly, because the bar was heavy and the people pushing it had been awake for two days.
Morag turned around to watch. Half the yard came out through them.
Old men with billhooks. Boys with their fathers’ bows.
A woman with a scythe blade lashed to a pole, and every one of them black to the eyebrows with smoke.
They stood in their own gateway and looked at the field, and at the Murray banners. Then they made a sound that Morag did not think she would ever forget.
Rolland brought his horse around and stood in his stirrups.
“Every man that’s laid down his sword, ye’ll take alive!” he shouted. “Alive, do ye hear me! Hands bound and intae the lower cells, and any man of mine that puts a blade in a prisoner today will answer tae me for it!”
Christopher came and stood beside her with his sword still in his hand.
Neither of them said anything for a while. Christopher’s hand found hers and she held on to it hard. Her father was being taken down off the rise behind them by two Murray men. He was still talking. Morag did not listen to a word of it.
“Ye let him live,” Christopher said at last.
“Aye.”
“He’d nae have done the same.”
“I ken.” She wiped her blade on the grass and put it away. “That’s rather the point, Christopher.”
He put his hand on the back of her neck for a moment, the way he did. She leaned into it before she could stop herself. Then he let it drop.
“He was tellin’ the truth,” Morag said.
Christopher turned his head. “About what?”
“About losin’.” She was still looking at the place where her father had knelt. “He said we’d lose again and soon, and I’ve watched that man lie tae kings. He wasnae lyin’. He kens somethin’ we dinnae, and he was pleased about it while I had a sword at his throat.”
The doors of the keep stood open behind them, and the smoke went straight up, and away to the north the sky was clear as far as she could see.